Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig speaks at a news conference after meeting the team owner at MLB headquarters in New York, Thursday, May 17, 2012.

Photo: Seth Wenig, Associated Press

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig speaks at a news...

Image 2 of 3

In this March 31, 2010, photo, Oakland Athletics owner and managing partner Lew Wolff, left, and general manager Billy Beane, center, watch as the Athletics played the Cincinnati Reds in a spring training baseball game in Phoenix. Wolff has been waiting years for his old fraternity brother, commissioner Bud Selig, to tell him whether he can go ahead with his outline to move the A's from Oakland into Santa Clara County even though the San Francisco Giants hold the territorial rights in technology-rich Silicon Valley.

Photo: Jeff Chiu, AP

In this March 31, 2010, photo, Oakland Athletics owner and managing...

Image 3 of 3

The A's plan for a Fremont stadium, initially unveiled in 2007, called for a 32,000-seat stadium, 3,100 units of housing and 500,000 square feet of retail west of Interstate 880, five miles from the nearest BART station.

Bud Selig's dawdling might have a purpose after all. Three years into its static work, his blue-ribbon panel on the future of the A's has come to seem like a child's imaginary friend.

After a quarterly meeting of Major League Baseball owners Thursday, the commissioner yet again reported no progress in refereeing the A's and Giants' fight over San Jose. But his comments about the Bay Area becoming a one-team territory hinted at the real purpose of the endless stall.

Asked whether the A's might consider leaving Northern California altogether, he said they could go anywhere that would win approval from the other owners.

"They could be all over the world, for that matter," Selig said.

One translation: Mumbai has as much a shot as San Jose.

A better interpretation: Oakland, it's your move. We can wait all decade.

The marriage between the city and its baseball team of 44 years has been disintegrating, but it might not be as irreparable as Lew Wolff and his silent fellow owner, John Fisher, would like everyone to believe. Selig's remarks about pulling out of the Bay Area might not seem like the ideal couples counseling, but they echoed threats that have repeatedly prompted civic leaders to "save" a team.

For a while now, Oakland's heartbeat on the matter has ranged from generally faint to ex-Mayor Jerry Brown's absolute flat line. Selig might have decided it was time to bring a defibrillator to the party.

The team's longing for San Jose didn't move the needle enough. For one thing, the A's still would have been within an hour's drive of their longtime fans. For another, the Giants have been adamant that they would not surrender their territorial rights to the Bay Area's largest city. So Selig invoked an unnamed location, outside the Bay Area, at a very opportune time.

Two weeks ago, the CEO of Clorox, Don Knauss, called a news conference with Mayor Jean Quan to say his Oakland-based company and several other local businesses could find a way to get a new stadium for the team, the only one in MLB still sharing quarters with an NFL franchise, and, if necessary, new ownership. In recent months, Raiders owner Mark Davis has suggested that he might need to pull up stakes, and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee made an overture to the Warriors to cross the bay and play in an arena near the Giants' park.

So Oakland has to contemplate losing all three occupants of the Coliseum complex. Would that be so awful, especially if the land could be used for better purposes? That depends heavily on how much local businesses see a sports franchise as a unifying factor that enhances a community's identity.

In the right spot, a baseball park can revitalize a city center, as the Giants' 12-year-old stadium has revamped South of Market. In San Jose, which has worked mightily to alter its image as suburbia loosely tethered to a downtown, the A's have been promoted as a critical addition to a growing urban core.

Burned by a deal to bring the Raiders back in 1995, Oakland understandably adopted a posture of straight-arming any suggestions about supporting another stadium. But Knauss' support for the A's, with Quan at his side, signaled a shift.

Wolff and Fisher's lust for San Jose has been stoked by the belief that it can generate significant corporate backing, far more than Oakland can hope to produce in the 21st century. This is a widely held belief, and it undermines the stature of the business community in Oakland. That might have prodded Knauss, who, in turn, prodded Selig.

Why else would the commissioner have responded so cavalierly to the question about the A's leaving the region?

Because he didn't see any harm in stating the obvious? If Selig were inclined in that direction, he would have said the equally obvious about the blue-ribbon panel's passivity. No decision means "no" to the A's. They aren't getting the rights to San Jose, not yet, not soon, not even over Larry Baer's stone-cold corpse.

The comment might have triggered disgust over the A's situation, and the Giants' role in it. But try to imagine how much public disgust would be needed to shame the Giants about the possibility of forcing the other baseball team out of their market. Now double it, and triple it. You'll be wrong, and the Giants will be ordering Champagne for the day the moving vans pull up to the Coliseum.

Selig just might have made the comment because he had nothing else to say, or because he enjoyed the joke. "They could be all over the world." Except in Pittsburgh, the Bronx, Kansas City, Queens, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Miami ... and let me think, who has the territorial rights to Montreal?